Baltic Dry Index. 1141 -59 Brent Crude 43.98
Spot Gold 1872
Coronavirus Cases 12/11/20 World 51,937,886
Deaths 1,285,601
If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.
John Maynard Keynes
In the central bankster fuelled casino economy, vaccine mania still rules, but for how long?
A vaccine may be available in quantity, and at a workable cost at some point next year, and it may have a plausible safety record too, but distant water doesn’t put out a raging pandemic fire that’s consuming more and more of the G-20 real economy now. How far off from implosion are we?
Asian shares rise on vaccine bets but analysts urge caution
November 12, 2020 12:13 AM By Stanley White, Lawrence Delevingne
TOKYO/BOSTON (Reuters) - Asian shares rose toward a more than two-year peak on Thursday, buoyed by sustained global stimulus efforts and hopes of a coronavirus vaccine, but some analysts warned of the risk of a correction lower.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS rose 0.44%, approaching the highest since January 2018. Chinese shares .CSI300 rose 0.37%. Stocks in Japan .N225 rose 0.62% to a 29-year high.
Australian stocks .AXJO bucked the regional trend and fell 0.31% as a decline in copper prices hurt shares in miners. S&P 500 stock futures EScv1 fell 0.15%.
Oil futures rose toward two-month highs due to optimism about a vaccine and a larger-than-expected drawdown in U.S. crude inventories.
The gains in Asia came after a mixed performance for U.S. stocks as investors switched back to technology stocks and away from economically sensitive sectors as they weighed COVID-19 vaccine progress and the likely timing of an economic rebound.
“The markets are waiting for more news about the virus, so it is difficult for investors to short equities,” said Daiju Aoki, regional chief investment officer for Japan at UBS Securities.
“These expectations can keep equities going for another few weeks, but there are still questions about the effectiveness of a vaccine and about U.S. fiscal policy. We could see a correction early next year.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI fell 0.08% on Wednesday, but the Nasdaq closed up 2%, and the S&P 500 .SPX gained 0.77%.
More
Oil nudges up on hopes OPEC+ will curb supply as COVID-19 cases rise
November 12, 2020 5:12 AM By Sonali Paul
MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Oil prices rose on Thursday, taking the week’s gains to more than 11% on growing hopes that the world’s major producers will hold off on a planned supply increase as soaring cases of COVID-19 dent fuel demand.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude CLc1 futures climbed 12 cents, or 0.3%, to $41.57 a barrel at 0436 GMT, while Brent crude LCOc1 futures rose 9 cents, or 0.2%, to $43.89 a barrel.
Algeria’s energy minister said on Wednesday that OPEC+ - grouping the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and other suppliers including Russia - could extend current production cuts of 7.7 million barrels per day (bpd) into 2021, or deepen them further if needed.
The weakening outlook has piled pressure on OPEC+ to hold back a supply increase of 2 million bpd scheduled for January, with the market now pricing in a delay, analysts said.
Both Brent and WTI have soared this week, lifted by hopes that the global coronarivus pandemic can be brought under control after initial trial data showed an experimental COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer Inc PFE.N and Germany's BioNTech 22UAy.DE was 90% effective.
“It’s great news, no question about that ... But it will take time for vaccines to be rolled out, and therefore it will take time for demand to be positively impacted by that,” said Lachlan Shaw, National Australia Bank’s head of commodity research.
In the meantime, fuel demand is under pressure from rising infections in Europe, the United States and Latin America. As a result, OPEC has said demand will rebound more slowly in 2021 than previously thought.
More
Back in the real economy, don’t look now, but there are growing signs that all those “free Covid-19 lunch” bills are turning up. Get ready for the Biden Bust?
Pandemic to deliver $12 trillion hit to global output - Swiss Re
November 11, 2020 11:53 AM
ZURICH (Reuters) - The coronavirus pandemic will likely put a $12 trillion (9.04 trillion pounds) hole in global economic output by the end of next year, a burden far too high for insurers to cover, Swiss Re SRENH.S said on Wednesday.
“Overall the insurance industry has handled this well because it entered the crisis with lots of capital. So it knew about the risk,” Chief Executive Christian Mumenthaler told a Bloomberg financial conference.
Many market players hedged early, he said, figuring the COVID-19 respiratory disease would spread around the world after first being identified in Wuhan, China, late last year.
“And then the overall loss as we can see it now - between $50 billion and $80 billion - is manageable for the insurance industry. You compare that to more than $140 billion in 2017 in terms of nat cat (natural disaster) losses,” he said.
“What didn’t work well is the understanding of what is covered. Pandemic, and that’s known by the insurance industry, is not a risk you can cover. We think the output loss for the world over these two years will be $12 trillion. And the balance sheet of insurers are a tiny fraction of that. So a pandemic is a risk that cannot be diversified and therefore it cannot be insured.”
A Swiss Re spokesman said the $12 trillion estimate referred to the level of economic output after COVID-19 compared with where the global economy would have stood had it grown at the average rate before the pandemic hit.
Analysis: Pandemic payment holidays mask wave of European problem debt
November 11, 2020 10:17 AM By John O’Donnell
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Pandemic payment breaks on European loans totalling billions of euros threaten to undermine efforts by the region’s banks to put the coronavirus crisis behind them.
Some of the millions of borrowers who were given repayment holidays by banks and governments across Europe shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic still need relief as a second wave of lockdowns squeezes the economy and puts people out of work.
But the longer their loan repayments are kept on ice, the bigger the potential problem for banks as debts stack up, making them more difficult to tackle.
The European Central Bank’s chief supervisor Andrea Enria has warned of a “huge wave” of unpaid loans that could top 1.4 trillion euros and has cautioned against postponing writing them off, warning that waiting for loan moratoria to expire could see many borrowers “unravel at once”.
Although the volume of loans on pause fell sharply over the summer, a Reuters survey and analysis of the latest data available shows that loans totalling about 320 billion euros ($380 billion) were still on a payment holiday at 10 of Europe’s biggest banks.
In Ireland, banks started to phase out payment holidays in September, a move Michelle O’Hara, a manager at a charity advising those in debt difficulty, said prompted a call surge.
Pilots, programmers and even horse trainers have joined those on lower pay in seeking advice. “There are people in difficulty who never anticipated being in trouble,” O’Hara said.
Personal debt in Europe, whether for houses, white goods or cars, is at a record high, European Union data shows. Although some countries cut back in the past decade, consumers in Britain, France and Germany borrowed roughly one fifth more.
So when payment holidays became widespread during the first wave of coronavirus lockdowns in Europe, lenders prepared for losses, with financial results showing that the 10 have set aside some 45 billion euros to cover the cost of unpaid loans.
An analysis of loans still on a payment break at ten of Europe's largest banks, Santander SAN.MC, HSBC HSBA.L, Barclays BARC.L, Societe Generale SOGN.PA, BNP Paribas BNPP.PA, ING INGA.AS, Intesa ISP.MI, UniCredit CRDI.MI, Deutsche Bank DBKGn.DE and Credit Agricole CAGR.PA, show many thousands are still delaying resuming monthly repayments.
For banks looking to avoid a return to the dark days of the debt crisis a decade ago, there is a delicate balancing act between meeting government requests to go easy on borrowers and not putting their loan books in jeopardy.
More
Corporate Tenants Dump Excess Office Space, Sending Shivers Through the Market
They offered a record 42 million square feet in the second and third quarters
Nov. 10, 2020 8:00 am ET
More companies are looking to dump excess office space by renting it out to new tenants, flooding the market with additional supply that could depress U.S. office rents.
With many employees planning to keep working from home for the foreseeable future, big corporate tenants in city centers say they have a surplus of office space. Most of those companies are locked into long leases of as long as 20 years and have little opportunity to get out of these agreements.
That is leading companies from Airbnb Inc. and Twitter Inc. in San Francisco to Expedia Group in Austin, Texas, to try to unload their overflow by subletting unwanted office space.
Corporate tenants put a record 42 million square feet of space on the office market in the second and third quarters, according to data firm CoStar Group Inc. That increased the total sublease space in the U.S. to roughly 157 million square feet, or 1.7% of the total office inventory. It is the highest rate since CoStar began measuring it in 2005.
---- The office market has held up much better this year than lodging or retail real estate. Hotel guests and conference organizers canceled trips and events after the pandemic hit. Many retail tenants have withheld rent. But most office tenants have been paying. Average office asking rents have barely fallen this year, according to Ian Anderson, senior research director of CBRE Group Inc.
Those metrics, however, mask how much supply is actually available after factoring in the tens of millions of square feet coming up for sublease. As more leases come up for renewal, the additional sublease supply is expected to pressure office rents, property analysts say.
It is made worse because corporate tenants are often more willing to offer their space at lower rents just to get some cash for it, said Jonathan Adelsberg, a partner and chair of the leasing department at law firm Herrick Feinstein LLP.
---- The sublease discount historically has been around 20% below market rate, he added, “but given the plethora of space on the market today, we expect to see discounts greater than that.”
---- But the office space starting to glut the market now could shave tens of billions of dollars of value off office buildings, creating big losses and the prospect of more defaults, analysts say.
“The heightened amount of sublease space suggests that tenants’ positions are more precarious than the vacancy rate would suggest right now,” said Nancy Muscatello, a CoStar senior analyst.
More
Great Portland's retail portfolio valuation plunges on pandemic hit
November 11, 2020 7:26 AM By Reuters Staff
(Reuters) - Property developer Great Portland Estates GPOR.L on Wednesday reported an 18% plunge in the valuation of its retail portfolio due to the coronavirus restrictions, with office take-up in central London dropping to a record low.
The company, which owns 2.6 billion pounds worth of property in central London, including retail and office space, said its net rental income in the six months ended Sept. 30 fell to 30.6 million pounds from 39.5 million pounds a year earlier.
Workspace slips to first-half loss, defers dividend decision
November 11, 2020 7:25 AM
(Reuters) - Workspace Group WKP.L on Wednesday swung to a first-half loss and pushed back a decision on full-year dividend as the office space provider struggled with a rise in customers vacating and downsizing due to the coronavirus crisis.
“There is no doubt that people’s expectations of the office are changing. Although this trend has been apparent to us for several years, the pandemic has accelerated fundamental changes to the role and requirements of the office for an increasing number of businesses and their employees,” the company said.
No shows, no insurance: Broadway actors losing health care as shutdown drags on
Published Wed, Nov 11 20206:34 AM EST
Just over a year ago, Caitlin Kinnunen was sitting in Radio City Music Hall shoulder-to-shoulder with the biggest Broadway stars, listening to her name read as a Tony nominee for best leading actress in a musical.
This spring, Kinnunen found herself out of work as an actor after the Covid-19 pandemic forced a shutdown of professional theaters. The 29-year-old ultimately boxed up her New York apartment and drove across the country to move back into her parents’ home in Washington.
Now, she faces a new threat: losing her health insurance.
Kinnunen and many professional stage actors earn their coverage by working a certain number of weeks each year. But with Broadway and almost all theaters across the country dark until the at least May 30, it has become impossible to find work that would enable them to qualify. As a result, thousands are expecting to lose health insurance. Kinnunen has the added plight of living with Type 1 diabetes.
“How am I going to live? How am I going to afford to live? Should I just find a career that will give me health care so I can have the life I have built up until now continue?” Kinnunen said in an interview with CNBC.
Kinnnunen said she has been able to stay on her union-sponsored insurance until April, at which point she will be kicked off because there are no contracts to be signed.
According to her union, Actors’ Equity, at the end of October 2019, its members accumulated about 265,000 work weeks that year. This year, the number of work weeks has plummeted by 65 percent to about 92,000 — including nearly three months of normal work before the shutdown.
The lack of work weeks is pushing somewhere between 200 and 300 union members off their health insurance a month, Actors’ Equity told CNBC.
More
Winter Watch.
The Arctic winter sea-ice expansion and northern hemisphere snow cover. From around mid-October, the northern hemisphere snow cover usually rapidly expands, while the Arctic ice gradually expands back towards its winter maximum.
Over simplified, a rapid expansion of both, especially if early, can be a sign of a harsher than normal arriving northern hemisphere winter. Perhaps more so in 2020-2021 as we’re in the low of the ending sunspot cycle, which possibly also influenced this year’s record Atlantic hurricane season.
Adding to this year’s winter concerns, a developing La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific. While the La Nina effect on the winter weather of western Europe is weaker than that of an El Nino pattern, which tends to make for a milder winter, a La Nina pattern tends to make for a colder winter.
Northern Eur-Asia turned snowy fast in mid-October. The Arctic sea ice expansion was slow, and from a very low level at the end of September, but with the vastly expanded snow cover, sea ice formation sped up.
With the Kara and Laptev sea ice speeding up fast now, especially in the Laptev Sea which is virtually back to normal, at the end of the first week of November I’m starting to think that it will likely be a normal to slightly colder winter ahead for western Europe.
US National Ice Center.
https://www.natice.noaa.gov/ims/
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Following Pfizer, Russia says anything you can do, we can do better and faster.
Russia says its Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine is 92% effective
November 11, 2020 9:06 AM By Polina Ivanova
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine is 92% effective at protecting people from COVID-19 according to interim trial results, the country’s sovereign wealth fund said on Wednesday, as Moscow rushes to keep pace with Western drugmakers in the race for a shot.
The initial results are only the second to be published from a late-stage human trial in the global effort to produce vaccines that could halt a pandemic that has killed more than 1.2 million people and ravaged the world economy.
The results are based on data from the first 16,000 trial participants to receive both shots of the two-dose vaccine, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which has been backing its development and marketing it globally, said.
“We are showing, based on the data, that we have a very effective vaccine,” said RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev, adding that it was the sort of news that the vaccine’s developers would talk about one day with their grandchildren.
The analysis was conducted after 20 participants in the trial developed COVID-19 and examined how many had received the vaccine versus a placebo.
That is significantly lower than the 94 infections in the trial of a vaccine being developed by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech. To confirm the efficacy rate, Pfizer said it would continue its trial until there were 164 COVID-19 cases.
RDIF said the Russian trial would continue for six more months and data from the study will also be published in a leading international medical journal following a peer review.
---- Russia’s announcement follows swiftly on from results posted on Monday by Pfizer and BioNTech, which said their shot was also more than 90% effective.
The Russian results are another boost to other COVID-19 vaccines currently in development and are a proof of concept that the disease can be halted with vaccination.
Experts said knowledge about the trial’s design and protocol was sparse, making it difficult to interpret the figures released on Wednesday.
Scientists have raised concerns about the speed at which Moscow has worked, giving regulatory go ahead for the shot and launching a mass vaccination programme before full trials to test its safety and efficacy had been completed.
---- The Russian drug is named Sputnik V after the Soviet-era satellite that triggered the space race, a nod to the project’s geopolitical importance for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The vaccine is designed to trigger a response from two shots administered 21 days apart, each based on different viral vectors that normally cause the common cold: human adenoviruses Ad5 and Ad26.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine uses messenger RNA (mRNA) technology and is designed to trigger an immune response without using pathogens, such as actual virus particles.
Russia is also testing a different vaccine, produced by the Vector Institute in Siberia, and is on the cusp of registering a third, Putin said on Tuesday, adding that all of the country’s vaccines were effective.
More
Italy surpasses the 1 million COVID mark, joins top 10 worst-hit countries: Reuters tally
November 11, 2020 4:12 PM By Shaina Ahluwalia
(Reuters) - Italy, one of the European countries hit hardest by COVID-19, surpassed the one-million infections mark on Wednesday, leap-frogging Mexico to become one of the top 10 worst-affected countries globally, according to a Reuters tally.
The Italian health ministry said the country had registered 32,961 new cases over the past 24 hours, taking its total tally since the contagion first struck in February to 1.028 million.
The Reuters tally showed that top 10 countries accounted for over two-thirds of all the global coronavirus cases. The United States leads the list, which includes four other European countries besides Italy - Russia, France, Spain and Britain.
Italy has reported some 42,953 deaths so far, the health ministry said - the second-highest number in Europe after Britain. The country also has the highest fatality rate on the continent, at over 4.18%, the Reuters tally showed. By comparison, the United States has a 2.33% fatality rate.
In Italy, which became a global symbol of the crisis when army trucks were called in to transport the dead during the early months of the pandemic, daily average new cases are at a peak at more than 34,000 in the last seven days.
Deaths have been rising by more than 455 per day over the same period, but the rate appears to be picking up, with the health ministry reporting 623 COVID-related deaths on Wednesday - the highest figure since April 6.
For every 10,000 people in Italy, at least 170 are reported as COVID positive and over seven deaths are reported due to COVID.
More than 300,000 people have died of COVID-19 across Europe, according to a Reuters tally on Tuesday, and authorities fear that fatalities and infections will continue to rise as the region heads into winter despite hopes for a new vaccine.
With just 10% of the world’s population, Europe accounts for almost a quarter of the 1.2 million deaths globally, and even its well-equipped hospitals are feeling the strain.
Global Deaths Jump by Record; Japan on Alert: Virus Update
Bloomberg NewsNovember 11, 2020, 5:41 PM EST Updated on November 12, 2020, 12:56 AM EST
Global deaths jumped by a record, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Japan is bracing for a new daily record of coronavirus infections, as authorities began hinting they may take stronger measures to arrest the increase.
Cases worldwide top 52 million. U.S. new daily cases set a record, with the early epicenter of New York ordering measures to tamp down a fresh wave. A deadly resurgence continued in Europe. The U.K. became the first country in Europe to surpass 50,000 deaths. Spain’s death toll topped 40,000, while Germany reported its most daily fatalities since mid-April.
On the vaccine front, Moderna Inc. said its trial has reached a key target for analyzing the shot’s effectiveness. Brazil reversed its decision to suspend Sinovac Biotech Ltd.’s studies amid criticism the decision was politicized.
Key Developments:
- Global Tracker: Cases top 52 million; deaths at 1.28 million
- U.S. Hot Spots: America’s longest surge is getting longer
- Searches for Hong Kong to Singapore flights triple in hours
- Tokyo’s tiny noodle bars shut down rather than put up prices
- U.K. mobilizes for vaccine redemption after pandemic missteps
- Podcast: What to expect from the virus and the vaccine race
- Vaccine Tracker: Encouraging breakthroughs offer hope
More
Next, some vaccine links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines. https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Stanford Website. https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
Regulatory Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker. https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some other useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
Covid19info.live
Centers for Disease Control Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
Technology Update.
With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards.
Improving high-energy lithium-ion batteries with carbon filler
Conductive carbon fillers in lithium-ion batteries allow high power output with reversible energy storage
Date: November 10, 2020
Source: American Institute of Physics
Summary: Lithium-ion batteries are the major rechargeable power source for many portable devices as well as electric vehicles, but their use is limited, because they do not provide high power output while simultaneously allowing reversible energy storage. New research aims to offer a solution by showing how the inclusion of conductive fillers improves battery performance.
Research reported in Applied Physics Reviews, by AIP Publishing, aims to offer a solution by showing how the inclusion of conductive fillers improves battery performance.
The optimum battery design involves thick electrode structures. This enhances the energy density, but the design suffers from poor lithium-ion transport, a key step in the functioning of these electrodes. Various improvement techniques have been tried, including building vertically aligned channels or creating pores of the proper size to facilitate transport of the lithium ions.
Another approach involves the use of fillers made of carbon that conduct electricity. This study considered three types of fillers: single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs), graphene nanosheets, and a substance known as Super P, a type of carbon black particles produced during oxidation of petroleum precursors. Super P is the most commonly used conductive filler in lithium-ion batteries.
The fillers were added to a type of electrode material known as NCM that contains nickel, cobalt, and manganese. The investigators examined the resulting composites with scanning electron microscopy. The Super P and NCM particles were found to be arranged in a point-to-point contact mode.
The SWCNTs were, however, wrapped around the NCM particles, forming a conductive coating. In addition, networks of interconnected SWCNTs were observed in the spaces between NCM particles. The graphene nanosheets were also wrapped around the NCM electrode particles but not as uniformly as the SWCNTs were.
The SWCNTs were found to be the best conductive filler for NCM electrodes.
"The measured conductivity is consistent with percolation theory ... When an electrically conductive filler is added to an insulating matrix, significant increases in conductivity will occur once the first conducting pathway through the composite is formed," said Guihua Yu, one of the authors.
Since percolation requires a complete pathway through the filler, a sufficient amount of conductive filler is needed. Therefore, the investigators considered various amounts of filler and found that combining NCM electrodes with as little as 0.16% by weight of SWCNT produced good electrical conductivity. Higher amounts of Super P and graphene were required to achieve these same results.
The investigators used several spectroscopic techniques, including Raman and X-ray absorption spectroscopy, to study the resulting composites.
"This is a collaborative effort from the Center for Mesoscale Transport Properties, an Energy Frontier Research Center supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences program. Our findings suggest that the integration of SWCNTs into the NCM electrode facilitate ion and charge transfer. This will lead to higher electrochemical utilization, especially at high rates of discharge," Yu said.
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith
No comments:
Post a Comment